All posts filed under: Iraq

Just a reminder of Wes Clark’s claim the US planned back in 2002 to “take out 7 countries in 5 years”. Six of those countries – Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon & Syria – have now had “revolutions” or “civil wars” or conflict. – Iran is the seventh.

by Denis Churilov ISIS/Daesh is likely to be defeated in Syria and Iraq very soon. But will it bring peace to the region? No. There are many potential local conflicts that can break out in the nearest future. Some of them are already going on, some of them are in the dormant state, waiting to be triggered. Other conflicts might be created spontaneously out of thin air. Let’s try to predict the upcoming conflicts in the Middle East. The following list contains the worst case scenarios that are not mutually exclusive and can, in fact, facilitate one another in a domino effect style: A civil war in Iraq between Kurdish Erbil and Iranian-backed Baghdad government. We have already seen reports on the clashes between Peshmerga forces and the Shia militias in 2016. The recent developments with the referendum may soon exacerbate the situation, especially considering that ISIS has been seriously weakened and now can’t serve as a unifying common threat factor. Kurds in Turkey. The clashes between various Kurdish militants and Erdogan’s government have been …

by Kit Nobody should be surprised to learn that Alistair Campbell, the former Blair PR guru, suffers from psychological problems. Obviously, lacking empathy to the extent that you can start an illegal war with a peaceful country, for the lone purpose of enriching corporate interests, would be a red flag to any psychiatrist worth his salt. Even supposing you weren’t entirely psychopathic beforehand, the associated guilt-rotting of the soul, after the fact, would surely be enough to drive one mad. Just look at Blair. Look at his mummified, rictus grin and tell me that’s not a man whose evil has stained his face. No, no one is surprised that Alistair Campbell has mental problems. And, sadly, no one is surprised that the Guardian gives him column inches – not just to whine about the stress involved in coordinating (among other things) mass-murder – but also to plug his book. I will not name it or link to it here, it doesn’t deserve the clicks. In any right-thinking society, this man would be in prison for …

from Moon of Alabama The Washington Post falls back into its 2005 mode of blaming Iran for the capabilities of a local insurgency. This time it is not Iraq where Iran is allegedly providing to insurgents, but Bahrain. Old and debunked claims are hauled up and propaganda from the U.S. proxy Sunni dictatorship is cited as “evidence”. It is a top-right front-page story in the Sunday edition and thereby “important”. It is also fake news. The headline: U.S. increasingly sees Iran’s hand in the arming of Bahraini militants. The core: The report, a copy of which was shown to The Washington Post, partly explains the growing unease among some Western intelligence officials over tiny Bahrain, a stalwart U.S. ally in the Persian Gulf and home to the Navy’s Fifth Fleet. Six years after the start of a peaceful Shiite protest movement against the country’s Sunni-led government, U.S. and European analysts now see an increasingly grave threat emerging on the margins of the uprising: heavily armed militant cells supplied and funded, officials say, by Iran. The …

from UKColumn News On March 9 The Queen and Prince Philip unveiled a new monument to “honour the duty and service of both UK armed forces and civilians” in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, it’s official. The UK celebrates its illegal wars, the subsequent murder of tens of thousands of innocent people, the destruction of a society and the fostering of terrorism. The artist who created the monument described it as “twin monoliths” in a nod towards 9/11.

Robbie Martin of AVeryHeavyAgenda.com joins James Corbett to talk about his research into the anthrax attacks of 2001 They discuss how false information claiming an Iraqi link to the attacks was sowed via the mainstream media and how the story largely disappeared when the anthrax traced back to the US government’s own bioweapons labs. They also update the case and talk about some of the legitimate suspects in the attacks.

How the Pentagon paid a British PR firm $500 million for top secret Iraq propaganda by Crofton Black and Abigail Fielding-Smith at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism A controversial foreign PR firm known for representing unsavory characters was paid millions by the Pentagon to create fake terrorist videos. The Pentagon gave a controversial UK PR firm over half a billion dollars to run a top secret propaganda program in Iraq, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal. Bell Pottinger’s output included short TV segments made in the style of Arabic news networks and fake insurgent videos which could be used to track the people who watched them, according to a former employee. The agency’s staff worked alongside high-ranking U.S. military officers in their Baghdad Camp Victory headquarters as the insurgency raged outside. Bell Pottinger’s former chairman Lord Tim Bell confirmed to the Sunday Times, which has worked with the Bureau on this story, that his firm had worked on a “covert” military operation “covered by various secrecy documents.” Bell Pottinger reported to the Pentagon, the …

by Rebecca Barrigos from redflag.org.au September marks 15 years since the US state turned the tragedy of the World Trade Centre attacks into a justification for years of brutality and horror inflicted on the population of the Middle East. The “war on terror”, launched by the administration of president George W. Bush in the weeks following 9/11, revealed the naked barbarity of US imperialism. It extended far beyond the borders of Afghanistan, where the US first invaded, to subject the populations of Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan and beyond to sickening violence. This war was never about delivering democracy or protecting human rights; it was always about expanding US power. The US state saw an opportunity to occupy and reshape the Middle East in order to control its oil reserves, thereby obtaining leverage against economic rivals and ensuring the future profitability and dominance of the US economy. The Iraqi city of Fallujah is testament to the human toll of the project. It has been razed three times since the US first occupied in 2003. Once home to …

The Chilcot Report was released On Wednesday, and a hard copy can be yours for just £767 (though I would suggest reading it free online here), and while there will doubtless be many and varied autopsies of the evidence and documents, this early observation is an interesting one. An eagle-eyed reader brought the following documents to our attention, as they contain many sections that hint war with Syria may have been on the NATO/US agenda as far back as October 2001. First there is this, from a letter dated 11th of October 2001 (all emphasis ours): …The uncertainty caused by Phase 2 seeming to extend to Iraq, Syria etc because it seems to confirm the UBL [Osama Bin Laden] propaganda this is the West vs Arab[sic]. Tony Blair, letter to GW Bush, 11/10/01 This quote suggests that Syria and “etc.” (Lebanon or Iran, at a guess) were already in the crosshairs. Interestingly, it is followed by: Incidentally, the leaders all warned about treating Syria like Iraq. It’s safe to say the warnings of these “leaders” …

Andrew Marr gave this piece to camera for BBC News outside 10 Downing Street April 9 2003, the day Baghdad was “liberated” by US troops. We all know now the hollowness of this triumphalists nonsense. We know about the atrocities committed by the “coalition of the willing” against Iraqi civilians, the indiscriminate usage of depleted uranium, the wanton and deliberate destruction of infrastructure. Above all we know about the web of lies that underpinned it all. If the BBC and other outlets had been doing their job we might have found out more about the latter before it was too late. Lives would have been saved. The geopolitics of the Middle East might have been saved from chaos. But instead of objective reporting and investigation the BBC gave us Marr genuflecting and drooling and telling us Blair was “right” and revealed as a “larger man.” Is it acceptable to see the same outlets – and even many of the same names – shilling just as brazenly today for the “humanitarian” invasion of Syria?

by Jonathan Cook It will be no surprise to readers of this blog that I believe Tony Blair should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for assisting George Bush in attacking Iraq in 2003. The Chilcot inquiry, however compromised its members were by their establishment ties and however cautious they were in their use of language, have very belatedly reached the same conclusion. If “military action at that time was not a last resort” and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein “posed no imminent threat”, then Bush and Blair launched a war of aggression. And that, according to the definition laid out by the Nuremberg Tribunal, is the “supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” But what I think of Blair’s actions and what Chilcot thinks of them are irrelevant to the question of what Iraqis – who were the chief victims of this crime – think of the attack on their country. And here a deception, mirroring those we have …

by Prof. Michael Chossudovsky, for Global Research Almost 2 years ago, August 8, 2014, Obama launched a bombing campaign against Syria and Iraq, in defiance of international law. The US Air Force with the support of a coalition of 19 countries has relentlessly waged an intensified air campaign against Syria and Iraq allegedly targeting the Islamic State (ISIS) brigades. The counterterrorism operation was granted a humanitarian R2P mandate: at the outset, the bombing campaign was allegedly directed against the Islamic State mercenaries (ISIS) with a view to protecting the Yazidis of Northern Iraq. Obama: A Pack of Lies According to Obama, military action was needed to protect innocent civilians and prevent ISIS’ advance on Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish autonomous region. In his Nationwide address on August 7, 2014, Obama also intimated the need to send in US ground troops: Good evening. Today I authorized two operations in Iraq — targeted airstrikes to protect our American personnel, and a humanitarian effort to help save thousands of Iraqi civilians who are trapped on a mountain without food and …

from New Eastern Outlook In an ideal world, Tony Blair would have been tried for war crimes years ago, and most probably would be over a decade into a life-time jail sentence for his role in the Iraq war. However, in our Orwellian world, devoid of justice and accountability, Blair is doing what he does best: warmongering. The former British Prime Minister stated this week that in order to defeat ISIS, Britain and the wider West will have to “wage a proper ground war against them.” Blair has been a vocal of proponent of deploying ground forces against ISIS in the Middle East and North Africa, calling again for Western troops on the ground in March of this year. Blair’s remarks are conformation of what many in the independent media have been warning about for years now; that some individuals in the West are trying to use the threat of ISIS (which they created) to launch a full-scale invasion of Syria and attempt to oust Assad. If the West is filled with enough hubris to …

by Mark Taliano One of the unstated goals of imperial warfare is to make hapless civilians pay a price for having the temerity to be born in a targeted nation. Prior to the illegal invasion of Iraq, for example, the Western oligarchies imposed sanctions which destroyed water treatment infrastructures and killed about 700,000 children, and about 1 million other innocent Iraqis. These consequences were all planned and projected. There was nothing accidental about the mass killings. It was simply imperial punishment for living in Iraq. Part of the calculus for such barbarity is that Imperialists hope that such punishments will demoralize local populations, and possibly make them reject their leaders. It falls under the euphemistic categories of “destabilization” and “collateral damage”. More accurately, it is targeted mass murder. Why did the Western oligarchies choose to destroy Iraq and its people? It had nothing to do with Weapons of Mass Destruction, or terrorism, or any other of the creative lies perpetrated by cooked intelligence reports and public relations agencies. More accurately, CIA asset Saddam Hussein had …

by Ian Sinclair at Open Democracy This is a good summary of some of the under-reported realities of the Mid-East situation, though we could offer a caveat to its penultimate para. Is the “chaos and violence” in Libya and elsewhere actually an accidental by-product of US policy? After all one way of “controlling” the oil resources of the Middle East is to destroy infrastructure and thereby remove the country’s ability to mobilise those resources, and there is plenty of evidence that deliberately engendered chaos is perceived by many in Washington as serving US geopolitical interests in the Mid East and beyond Speaking in the House of Commons in January 2003, just two months before the US-UK invasion of Iraq, British Prime Minister Tony Blair stated: The very reason why we are taking the action that we are taking is nothing to do with oil or any of the other conspiracy theories put forward. Blair’s analysis was amplified by newspaper columnist David Aaronovitch who, ironically, would go on to write a book dismissing popular conspiracy theories. …

a documentary by Naomi Klein “In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world– through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries. At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts…. New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or …

It’s been a month now since newly declassified US intelligence documents confirmed that the rise of ISIS was not only predicted by the West, the Gulf States and Turkey, but an actually desirable goal as part of their quest to destabilize the government of Bashar al-Assad. That revelation, long understood but finally confirmed in black-and-white, underscored the fundamental hypocrisy of the entire War of Terror: the promotion of an increasingly tyrannical police state within the US’ own borders in the name of the shadowy terror threat at the same time the government itself was actively fostering, training and arming those terrorists abroad.

A declassified secret US government document obtained by the conservative public interest law firm, Judicial Watch, shows that Western governments deliberately allied with al-Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups to topple Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad.

By Mike Whitney “Iraq’s fate was sealed from the moment we invaded: it has no future as a unitary state … Iraq is fated to split apart into at least three separate states…This was the War Party’s real if unexpressed goal from the very beginning: the atomization of Iraq, and indeed the entire Middle East. Their goal, in short, was chaos – and that is precisely what we are seeing today.” — Justin Raimondo, editor Antiwar.com A bill that could divide Iraq into three separate entities has passed the US House Armed Services Committee by a vote of 60 to 2. The controversial draft bill will now be debated in the US House of Representatives where it will be voted on sometime in late May. If approved, President Barack Obama will be free to sidestep Iraq’s central government in Baghdad and provide arms and assistance directly to Sunnis and the Kurds that are fighting ISIS. This, in turn, will lead to the de facto partitioning of the battered country into three parts; Kurdistan, Shiastan, and …

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